MFA Alum Named 2020 Rona Jaffe Foundation Writer’s Award Winner

Fiction writer and University of Maryland 2019 MFA graduate Temim Fruchter is a 2020 Rona Jaffe Foundation Writer’s Award winner.

The awards are given annually to six women writers who demonstrate excellence and promise in the early stages of their careers. Celebrating our 26th year, the Rona Jaffe Awards have helped many women build successful writing lives by offering encouragement and financial support at a critical time.

Due to ongoing coronavirus concerns, the Foundation’s annual September awards celebration in New York City was cancelled. The 2020 Writers’ Awards were officially announced on September 15. The other recipients are Hannah Bae (nonfiction), Mari Christmas (fiction), Yalitza Ferreras (fiction), Elisa Gonzalez (poetry), and Charleen McClure (poetry). The winners received awards of $30,000 each.

The winners will participate in a virtual reading in New York University’s Creative Writing Program Reading Series on Thursday, September 17, 7 p.m. It is free and open to the public. Registration information is here.

Temim Fruchter is working on both a short story collection and her first novel, City of Laughter. These projects reflect and celebrate her deeply rooted Jewish heritage and her queer identity combining a keen intellect with playful inventiveness and deep wisdom. She says, “My novel spans four generations of women in an Eastern European Jewish family and dreams of a queer ancestral line. The story zigzags geographically and temporally, moving from Poland in the 1920s to Brooklyn in the 1950s, to Maryland in the 1980s, and finally, to contemporary Warsaw. Part speculative queer family history and part polyphonic sacred encyclopedia, the novel’s central story is interspersed with a body of invented Jewish folklore that, while heavily remixed, is inspired by the stories that raised me and the superstitions that shaped my imagination.” Fruchter began her career as a musician and in 2013 turned her creative attention to writing. She received her M.F.A. from the University of Maryland in 2019. Her work has appeared in Tupelo Quarterly, Foglifter, NPR, Brevity, and PANK. In 2020 she received fiction awards from New South and American Literary Review as well as a fellowship from Vermont Studio Center. She says, “I feel a kind of urgency – the most excited and hungry kind – to finish this first book and launch it into the universe. My path has been non-linear, and, as such, I take the hard work and spiritual maintenance of building a writing life very seriously.” Fruchter works for an education non-profit and has recently returned to New York City. She will use her Writer’s Award to create time and opportunities outside of her day job to devote more attention to completing her novel.

Celebrated novelist Rona Jaffe (1931-2005) established The Rona Jaffe Foundation Writers’ Awards program in 1995. Since the program began, the Foundation has awarded more than $3 million to emergent women writers, including several who have gone on to critical acclaim, such as Rachel Aviv, Elif Batuman, Chelsea Bieker, Eula Biss, Lan Samantha Chang, Ebony Flowers, Vievee Francis, Rivka Galchen, Vanessa Hua, Alex Marzano-Lesnevich, ZZ Packer, Helen Phillips, Kirstin Valdez Quade, Sharifa Rhodes-Pitts, Namwali Serpell, Solmaz Sharif, Tracy K. Smith, Mary Szybist, and Tiphanie Yanique.